The Sun is massive
Every now and then I dip into cosmology 101, trying to improve my picture of—and my feel for—the Universe was find ourselves in.
Today I learnt that every second, the Sun burns off 4 million tonnes of mass—roughly 2 million cars.
It will do this for most of its 10 billion year “main phase”. During those 10 billion years, it’s total mass will decrease by only 0.07%. The Sun is massive.
And by the way: there are 250 million stars in the Milky Way galaxy. And there are hundreds of millions of galaxies in the Observable Universe. And the Universe itself may be infinitely large, whatever that means.
Awareness of things like this makes me more open to “wild” claims about the future of things on Earth.